Data Strategy Course – Business Data
Section 2.3 Business Data Module
Hello and welcome to my course – on ‘Data Strategy’.
This is Ade Awokoya from LBAcademy. I am a Digital Transformation Adviser, enabling support for Business to innovate on a digital platform, with a focus on your business model.
In this session, on Business Data, we’ll be covering the fundamentals and best practices of good data management, the technology that’s available to help and discuss how and when business should apply them as they grow.
Improve your business processes
Here are three benefits of improving your business process
First, this makes your customers’ life easier and boosts customer satisfaction in the process.
Second, building better products your customers really want, making your product smarter is a great way to use data for an in-depth understanding of your customers.
Third responding to customers needs more quickly, with the customer journey sped up thanks to our permanent use of mobile devices.
Improve and automate your business processes with data
Once you have found out some of the potential uses of data in your business, you can now follow up in some detail. Use a regular template for each potential use case, so that you approach each case in the same structured way. to offer better products.
You can break the process down into two primary steps.
First, identify the potential applications of data in your business, and then you can begin to narrow down potential use cases down to just a few top priorities. This is the best way to ensure data delivers maximum value for your business. Therefore, this first step involves looking at what your business is trying to achieve and what unique challenges your business is facing, and then identifying potential solutions through the use of data and analytics.
You’ll end up with a list of potential use cases. Don’t limit yourself to a small number of use cases at this stage as you’ll be narrowing down your options in the second step. For now, your goal is to explore the many ways in which data could help your organization achieve its key strategic goals.
Second, define your data use cases and flesh out each of your separate data use cases, you go through them and prioritize them in step two of your data strategy process. You may have identified as many from 3 to 10 use cases in your previous phase, but trying to embark on too many data projects at once can spell disaster.
That’s why you now need to rank your data use cases in order of their strategic importance to the business. Your goal here is to arrive at your top one, two or three key strategic use cases. These are your absolute top data priorities for now, the data use cases that represent the biggest opportunities for your business or will help you solve the biggest business challenges.
As a small business, you may only want to focus on one key data priority at a time due to budget and resource constraints, so don’t be tempted to prioritize more than three.
You also want to identify one or two quick wins from your data use cases. It often helps to identify one or two short term, smaller projects that are relatively quick and easy and inexpensive to implement.
Identifying these quick wins will help you demonstrate the value of data, win people over and solve the seeds for your bigger data project. As for those use cases that don’t make the cut for now, don’t disregard them completely.
Identify and prioritize data use cases
As you choose One data project, you may find you have capacity to move on to another use case. Or it may be that your overall strategic priorities shift, which means data use cases that were identified some time ago, are no longer relevant.
You should repeat this process of identifying and prioritizing data use cases at least every quarter or every time you review your overarching business strategy.
To help prioritize your data use cases, it also makes sense to look for common themes, overlaps and complementarities across the data use cases in terms of data requirements, data, governance, technology, skills and capacity and implementation and change management issues.
Looking across your identified use cases can help you identify common themes and ensure you address them holistically in your overall data strategy.
Case Study Example
Defining data use cases – employee engagement case
Consider an employee engagement case, where we’ll need consent from employees together and use survey data to ensure more accurate, honest results. Link to strategic goal, because it’s so easy to get caught up in all the incredible things data can do, it’s vital you can link each use case to a strategic business goal.
As a business owner, yourself or the HR Manager would need to assume ultimate ownership of this use case users and data customers.
Data objective
For example, when implementing your employee survey, staff and leadership will need to be educated on why the system is being implemented and how it would benefit the business.
Data Governance
For our employee engagement case, we need consent from employees together and use survey data in the interest of ethical data usage and to ensure more accurate, honest results.
Implementation and change management, every project will encounter implementation challenges.So it is your opportunity to identify potential roadblocks and implementation requirements and ensure that your plan doesn’t get derailed.
Data Analytics
One useful method for employee engagement use case is text analytics. This can be used to analyze survey responses, interviews and even emails or social media posts.
So here you need to identify what those implications, challenges and requirements are.
In very simple terms, this means identifying what software and hardware you need to collect and store data, analyze the data and communicate the results.
Skills and capacity
If we wanted to go that far to extract insights on how employees really feel about the company technology, any data project will have implications for technology and infrastructure. Perhaps you will need a hybrid of in-house and external skills to continue with this simple use case.
Benefit and outcomes:
Other people (staff) in the business who will be using the data should have learning outcomes from the insights generated.
Build on the results obtained from the (survey) use case, to invest in a third party employee engagement platform that can conduct regular poll surveys with your employees.
